I have a paper notebook with Excel formulae and SQL code from when I first started as an analyst. Code like:
YEAR(DateColumn) * 100 + MONTH(DateColumn)
which gave use the format 202406 in our analysis and
SUBSTRING(xxx, CHARINDEX('x', xxx), 4)
find x in column xxx and return 4 characters
Fast forward a few years when I was learning R
I realised I couldn’t search for things like I could like SQL
because I didn’t know what things were called!
And whilst I was keeping notes on code there was all the other context and methodology information
And this was kept on Sharepoint which was restricted access
Don’t Repeat Yourself
well I was doing that all the time
And making mistakes
A solution needed to be:
I started off with a book
I ended up with a book
Books, presentation slides and blogs lead to websites like this from the Royal Statistical Society
Which lead to data science solutions like GitHub actions and Docker
And many, many mistakes (also known as trial and error!)
To Matt Dray for {quartostamp} because I always forget what’s possible in Quarto and how to write the code!